Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky (Виктор Борисович Шкловский; 1893–1984) was a Russian and Soviet literary theorist, critic, novelist, and pamphleteer. He was a major voice of Formalism, a critical school that had great influence in Russian literature in the 1920s.

Contents

Educated at the University of St. Petersburg, Shklovsky helped found OPOYAZ, the Society for the Study of Poetic Language, in 1914. He was also connected with the Serapion Brothers, a collective of writers that began meeting in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in 1921. Both groups felt that literature's importance lay primarily not in its social content but rather in its independent creation of language. In O teorii prozy (1925) and "Metod pisatelskogo masterstva" (1928), Shklovsky argued that literature is a collection of stylistic and formal devices that force the reader to view the world afresh by presenting old ideas or mundane experiences in new, unusual ways. His concept of ostranenie, or "making it strange", was his chief contribution to Russian Formalist theory.

Shklovsky also wrote autobiographical novels, chiefly Sentimentalnoye puteshestvie: vospominaniya, a widely acclaimed memoir of life during the early years of Bolshevik rule; and Zoo. Pisma ne o lyubvi, ili Tretya Eloiza. Both of these books were published in 1923, during a period (1922-23) when he lived in Berlin. He returned permanently to the Soviet Union in the latter year, at which time the Soviet authorities dissolved OPOYAZ, obliging Shklovsky to join other state-sanctioned literary organs. With his essay "Monument to a Scholarly Error" (1930), he finally bowed to the Stalinist authorities' displeasure with Formalism. Thereafter, he tried to adapt the theory of the accepted doctrine of Socialist Realism. He continued to write voluminously, publishing historical novels, film criticism, and highly praised studies of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Mayakovsky. (Source).